What has been the company’s journey in India like so far?
Micro Focus provides innovative software that allows companies to develop, test, deploy, assess and modernise business-critical enterprise applications. With the acquisition of Borland Software Corporation and the testing and ASQ business of Compuware Corporation, Micro Focus now has a very strong position and product portfolio in the fields of application testing and management. Globally Micro Focus has more than 18,000 customers and over two million licensed users, including 91 of the Fortune Global 100 companies.
Micro Focus has been present in India since 2008, though the acquired companies mentioned above have been present for a much longer tenure. We are present in all major cities, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. In line with our global strategy, we are strengthening our position in the application testing and management market in India through our strong portfolio of solutions that enable our customers? business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk.
To further strengthen our position, we are focussing on building a stronger team for sales, marketing and technology.
What products and services do you offer Indian customers?
Business events drive business change: Globalisation, organisational change, new legislation, competitive attacks and more. Keeping business applications relevant, vibrant and delivering increased value and competitive advantage is at the top of every CIO’s agenda.
Micro Focus has designed solutions to help our customers meet the challenges and opportunities that change presents. Our approach enables them to:
? Replicate existing deployment technologies to maintain business value
? Ensure portability, neutrality and openness for the future
? Leverage the next generation of better, faster, cheaper hardware and software architectures to the fullest
? Meet the demands of the mobile, web enabled communities of tomorrow
What trends do you foresee in the Indian telecom space?
Mobile application development has been a top initiative in 2011 for nearly all enterprises. A recent survey by the analyst firm Forrester showed that more than 50 per cent of enterprises are most interested in using mobile applications or mobile optimised websites to reach out to their customers, and providing mobile support to employees isn?t far behind with 39 per cent mobilising employee intranets and 29 per cent introducing mobile collaboration solutions.
Companies are challenged with delivering access to business applications 24/7, ensuring those applications continue to perform under peak loads to meet the ever-increasing expectation of users.
As the number of users accessing business applications via mobile devices increases, the challenge faced by the enterprise becomes even more complex. Internet access is changing rapidly and device diversity is putting mixed loads on web sites. Today?s users expect the same response times but websites behave differently when accessed by mobile devices depending on the operating system, browser and network service they have. This makes simulating peak demands and client complexity, as well as diagnosing system performance, harder than ever. When you add testing peak demand loads from multiple global locations into the mix, the challenge is clear to see.
Micro Focus SilkPerformer offers simulation capabilities for a variety of mobile phones, such as Android, iOS and Blackberry devices. This is important because different screen sizes and input methods such as touch screens mean many web applications look different when loaded on a mobile device compared to a full site. These mobile versions of a web page need to be treated as separate applications when performance testing as they have different performance implications on the back end.
Micro Focus SilkPerformer also simulates the bandwidth limitations of mobile network connections and supports all existing and upcoming mobile phone standards like GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, HSPA+ and LTE, while its mobile browser simulation emulates mobile device traffic from different parts of the world.
What were the highlights of 2011 for the company?
– Launch of the enhanced Micro Focus SilkTest Suite that help organisations cut testing costs and build better software faster
– Micro Focus focused on software testing with its new integrated testing suite
– Launch of next generation solution for developing, deploying and managing distributed applications
– Launch of Silk for Use with SAP solutions to help organisations accelerate
– In line with the company?s strategy to expand footprints in India, Micro Focus appointed Redington as a value- added distributor for India
– Micro Focus was positioned by Gartner, Inc. In the leaders quadrant of the ?integrated software quality suites magic quadrant? report
– Launch of Visual COBOL R3 which Introduces Easy Portability to Java, Microsoft Azure Cloud and .NET Platforms
o There was also an update to the Visual COBOL R3 to R4 which brings to table the latest technologies that support new platforms including mobile, more language and IDE features to deliver even greater developer productivity improvement. It provides a modern programming environment for one of the oldest programming languages of all times, COBOL, also includes the much anticipated COBOL for JVM ? the fastest way to Java.
What are the challenges the Indian market poses for you?
Since the turn of the century, testing vendors in developed nations have traditionally focused on strategic, value-added services and IP-rich testing tools, while labor-intensive manual testing has been outsourced to areas such as Bangalore. Now, however, with a number of years of experience and an increasingly skilled workforce behind them, India?s testing suppliers are beginning to climb the value chain.
The subcontinent?s outsourcing giants are increasingly capable of offering sophisticated testing services which rival those of their American and European counterparts. As is obvious, software testing is one of the booming sectors in IT industry and India is on its way to becoming a global leader. However, an increasingly diverse range of competitors is emerging, challenging the established leaders at both end of the value chain. Perhaps inspired by the track record of India, China has made concerted efforts to establish itself as a major player within the technology industry over the past decade.
A recent report estimated that the Chinese software industry already accounts for revenues in excess of $50 billion each year, with testing among the fastest-growing areas of this. As Indian vendors expand to challenge European and American rivals at the higher end of the value chain (and as average wages for professionals increase accordingly), China (and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia) may well emerge as a new hub for labor-intensive, outsourced testing services.
The other challenge is skill shortage. Gartner Inc. has estimated that, within non-software companies, the highest ratios of testers to developers is around 1:3, meaning that many companies may have a ratio of four or five to one, or even more. When one considers that between a third and a half of the total cost of application development is accounted for by the testing process, this seems ominously low. Such discrepancies between demand and supply show why the testing stage often becomes a bottleneck in the software development process. While automation tools are capable of reducing much of the tester?s workload, it is clear that software testing, as a growing area of the IT industry, will require more skilled professionals in the years ahead.
While the growing status of the industry will no doubt help in attracting new graduates and school leavers into the profession, as with all skills shortages, this will not be solved overnight. Rather, it will require the co-operation of government, business and academia to identify the areas in which shortfalls are the highest and to then tailor curricula to meet these needs. While this shortfall is being addressed, responsibility for ensuring software quality will fall upon the shoulders of every stakeholder involved in the project, from analysts through to developers.
